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STYLE
METHODS OF EXPRESSION PRECISION METHODS OF EXPRESSION POWER METHODS OF EXPRESSION ENERGY METHODS OF EXPRESSION ELEGANCE COMPREHENSION AND UTILITY CHARM AND DISTINCTION STYLE 2 STYLE 3 STYLE 4 STYLE AND THE CLASSICS STYLE AND BANALITY METHODS OF EXPRESSION-STYLE The Factor Of Style style in the short story STYLE STYLE. IN all literature which is genuine, the substance or matter is not one thing and the style another ; they are inseparable. The style is not something superadded from without, as we may make a wooden house and then paint It; but it is breathed from within, and is instinct with the personality of the writer. Genuine literature expresses kot abstract conceptions, pure and colorless, but thoughts and things, as these are seen by some individual mind, colored with all the views, associations, memories, and emotions which belong to that mind. —Suitar. Matter vs. Manner. —Thus far the student's attention has been concentrated upon the what of his thoughts, with very few hints as to how he should express them. There are those that think this sufficient. "Style is nothing but the order and movement in which our thoughts run, " says one writer. " You have too much style, " grumbled an old critic. "Style is only a frame to hold the thoughts, as a window-sash holds the panes of glass. Too much sash obscures the light. " "If you think how you are to write, you will never write anything worth hearing. I write because I cannot help it, " said Mozart. "When we meet with the natural style we are highly delighted, because we expected to see an author, and we find a man, " said Pascal. "Style, indeed !" said Goethe. "The style of a writer is almost always the faithful representative of his mind. Therefore if anyone wishes to write a clear style, let him begin by making his thoughts clear ; and if any would write a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul. " The aphorism popularly but perhaps erroneously attributed to Buffon, that "The style is the man, " is a limited application of the general theory that there is such a relation between the mind of man and the speech he uses, that a perfect knowledge of either would enable an acute psychological philologist to deduce and construct the other from it. —MAnsa. The secret of good style in writing is, that words be used purely in their representative character, and not at all for their own sake. . . This it is that so highly distinguishes Webster's style— the best yet written on this continent. His language is so transparent, that in reading him one seldom thinks of it, and can hardly see it. In fact, the proper character of his style is perfect, consummate manliness ; in which quality I make bold to affirm that he has no superior in the whole range of English authorship. — HUDSON. Learn, so far an possible, to be intelligible and transparent—no notice taken of your style, but moiety of what you express by it : this in your clear rule, and if you have anything which is not quite trivial to express to your contemporaries, you will and such rule a great deal more difficult to follow than many people think. --Cxim. E. Excellent precept ; but, alas for performance! none ever broke the rule more habitually than Carlyle himself. The idiom which he ultimately forged for himself was a new and strange form of English—rugged, disjointed, often uncouth ; in his own phrase, "vast, fitful, decidedly fuliginous, " but yet bringing out with marvelous vividness the thoughts that possessed him, the few truths which he saw clearly and was sure of—while it suggested not less powerfully the dark background of ignorance against which these truths shone out. —SHAIBP. Modern linglish literature has nowhere any language to compare with the style of these (Newman's Parochial] Sermons, so simple and transparent, yet so subtle withal so strong and yet so tender ; the grasp of a strong man's hand, combined with the trembling tenderness of a woman's heart, expressing in a few monosyllablen truth which would have cost other men a page of philosophic verbiage, laying the most gentle yet penetrating finger on the very core of things, reading to men their own most secret thoughts better then they knew them themselves. Carlyle's style is like the full untutored swing of the giant's arm ; Cardinal Newman's is the assured self-possession, the quiet gracefulness of the flnishel athlete. The one, when he means to be effective, seizes the most vehement feelings and the strongest words within his reach, and hurls them impetuously at the object. Thu other, with disciplined moderation and delicate seltrestraint, shrinks instinctively from overstateunent, but penetrates more directly to the core by words of sobertruth and "vividexaotnens. "— Ozarks. At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in at) lea much alike ; nothing so easy as to fall into that of Messinger and the °them; wh. 10 no one has ever yet produceJ one scene conceived and exprested in the Shaksperian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakespeare is universal, and in fact has no manner ; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than nature lierselt—CoLsaiear. . Style is of course nothing else but the art of conveying the meaning approprhttely and with perspicuity, whatever that meaning may be, and one criterion of style is that it shall not be translatable without injury to the meaning. . . . in order to form a good style the primary rule and condition is. not to attempt to express ourselves in Language before we thoroughly know our own meaning: when a man perfectly understands him. elf, appropriate diction will generally be at his command, either in writing or speaking. In such cases the thoughts and the words are associated. In the next place, preciseness in the use of terms is required, and the test is whether you can translate the phrase adeqtately into simple terms, regard being had to the feeling of the whole passage. Try this upon Shakespeare or Milton, and see if you can substitute other simple wordi, in any given passage without a violation of the meaning or tone. The source of bad writing is the desire to be something more than a man of sense—the straining to be thought a genius; and it is just the same in speechmaking. If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be l--Cozzeinas. On the other hand, there is a view of style that makes it something more than habitual, natural expression. Titus Matthew Arnold says : "Style, in my sense of tho word, is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain spiritual excitement, a certain pressure of emotion, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it. . . . Power of style, properly so called, as manifested in masters of style, like Dante and Milton in poetry, Cicero, Bossuet, and Bolingbroke in prose, has for its characteristic effect this, to add dignity and distinction to it. " The best definitions of style make it consist in the unconscious but unavoidable and indispensable smack of individuality in the writer. The best style is not that which puts the reader most easily and in the shortest time in possession of a writer's naked thoughts, but that which is the truest image of a great intellect—which conveys fully, and carries farthest into other souls, the conceptions and feelings of a profound and lofty spirit. —CHANNrso. Science has to do with things, literature with thoughts; science CHAP. XVIII. ] THE STAMP OF INDIVIDUALITY. 345 is universal, literature is personal ; science uses words merely as symbols, and by employing symbols can often dispense with words; but literature uses language in its full compass, as including phraseology, idiom, style, composition, rhythm, eloquence, and whatever other qualities are included in it. —NEwzdAN. Literature being a fine art, as I understand it, a literary man can no more help having a style than a painter his ; it may be more or less strongly marked, finished or faulty, but it cannot be wholly bad, or even indifferent. There is an ideal of literary expression which looks upon language as best employed when it becomes the perfectly transparent medium of thought—like plate-glass, as advocates of this theory phrase it. It is of course always in good taste to be simple, and a plainness approaching to boldness is infinitely better than the " fine " language, so called, indulged in by pseudo-cultivated writers. But I have never been able to accept the plate-glass theory, and cannot help fancying that it is the unconscious refuge of writers and readers without any keen apprehension of the charms of literary style. Ease and unaffectedness are indeed prime requisites of a good style, but why should we forego the pleasure to be had from other and more positive qualities than these? The imperishable charm belonging to certain writers lies in their style ; it is their unique expression of their thought, more than the thought itself, we care for, as witness many of Lamb's most delightful sketches ; and in the most original writers this characteristic quality of expression is so much a part of their genius that it is scarcely possible to separate between substance and form, the ideas and their embodiment. In fact, one is sometimes tempted to call the thought the grosser particle in this combination, or interpenetration, so subtle and exquisite may be the charm of mere words, not only in poetry, but in imaginative prose. —AtlanticMonthly. Take an example, almost at random, from De Quincey. Speaking of the state of English hymnology at a certain period, be calls it "the howling wilderneas of psalmody. " "Ah, " says a pedantic critic, "that is rhetoric. " Very well ; strip it of its "rhetoric, " and yet express the same idea in its plenitude, if you can. It ts impossible. You cannot drop that figure, and yet express the same kind and the same volume of thought If anyone thinks he can, we are very safe in responding, "Try it. " A piece of Runde iron is not the same thing when melted and compacted and moulded into a slug. Analyze a fragment from Baskin, whose style is often thought personified. He wishes to express vividly the idea that feebleness in art is untruthfulness in effect. He writes, therefore, of the "struggling caricature of the meaner mind, which heaps its foreground with colossal columns, and heaves impossible mountains into the encumbered sky. " Ruskin here unconsciously imitates his thought by his vocabulary and syntax. Strip it of that imitation of sense by sound and structure, and what have you left ? Say something else than "heaves impossible mountains into the encumbered sky. " Say this, at a venture, "A poor artist paints mountains which could never have existed, in a sky which cannot conveniently hold them. " Have you parted with no thought in losing the Imitative adroitness of Ruskin's style ? In such examples thought so masters expression, and yokes it to use, that style itself becomes thought. You cannot separate them by the change of so much as a syllable without loss. —PnaLps. We are prone to regard literature as a strictly intellectual manifestation, when, nevertheless, the most conservative or preservative element of literature—humor—is scarcely an intellectual quality at all It belongs rather to the emotional side of the mind. The dry light of pure reason has the charm of flattering our self esteem by giving or seeming to give usan insight into the realities of things ; but it has the defect of wanting individuality; it attains its present state just in proportion as it discards all personal flavor, and approaches a sort of algebraic impersonality. And when an exceptional mind, like Bacon's, succeeds in burnishing reason into wit, it retains its hold upon our sympathies, not because of its truth, but because that truth is stated with a perspicuity and brilliance peculiar to Bacon, depending not upon the extent of Bacon's information, but upon the admirable strength and subtlety of his mental faculties. In order to realize this, we have only to reflect that the game truth, otherwise organized and presented by an inferior intelligence, would fail to establish a hold upon us. What really fascinates us is not the white unmodified glare of the absolute, but the various-colored rays produced by the passage of that glare through the finite medium of human minds ; and however diligently the generations of men may celebrate the eternal verities, nothing is more likely than that the eternal verities, considered in themselves, have but the faintest attraction for mankind. It belongs to our natuie that we should be to ourselves of paramount mutual Interest; and the ground of this interest is humor in its broadest sense. But humor— literary humor especially—has been conventionally limited to a narrower significance than this, and its possession in any noticeable degree is limited to comparatively few writers. Like tone in painting and expression in music, it is matter of temperament ; and its value, when genuine, is as permanent and as inexhaustible as human nature itself. —The Spectator. Naturalness, therefore, so far from being opposed to style, is the one thing a good style secures. Whenever a man poetically gifted expresses his best thoughts in his best words, then we have the style which is natural to him, and which, if he be a true poet, is sure to be a good style. — SHAIRP. What is naturalness of style ? We answer, those qualities which are found peculiar to an individual when science and art have developed what is good and removed what is bad among his personal characteristics. It is only by knowledge and training that our natural gifts and energies can be discovered and distinguished from such wrong prejudices and bad habits as are the results of false instruction early in life. Naturalness may be, and often is, understood to be that quality which is peculiar to an individual, or peculiar to that which is written or spoken by him spontaneously on any occasion, at any period of life. In this sense the communications of the most ignorant and immature minds have a seeming naturalness ; but in many cases of this kind it is ultimately found that what seemed natural was sheer affectation, the checkered effect of indiscriminate imitation, or the random effusion of brazen independence, or else the modest mistake of one who has a wrong object or an unwise aim. —Hzravmr. The End in View on the writer's part should be exact expression of his thought. This is a difficult attainment. Of all arts the art of speech is most intricate, its mastery most delicate. Some of his sentences will cost the beginner hours, days, weeks. The most clever and experienced writer will weigh synonyms in his mind before he pens his last paragraph. But the artist is distinguished from the artisan in that he will accept no illfitting word or phrase. Long as the search may be, lie will turn his thought over and over in his mind till it has clothed itself in the verbal garb that alone belts it. Sydney Smith said of Dr. Parr, "He never seems hurried by his subject into obvious inevitable language. " In other words, his thoughts were never clearly defined ; he was contented with vague, general, botchy expression. The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakespeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall viith your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages. The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike out the smallest block without making a hole in the picture. — Quarterly Review. Cowper possessed above all other modern poets the power of bending the most stubborn and intractable words in the language around his thinking, so asto fit its every indentation and irregularity of outline, as a ship-carpenter adjusts the planking, grown flexible in his hands, to the exact mould of his vessel. —Ifuen Aimmts. We proceed to a more particular examination of that particular quality of style which renders it intelligible. We denominate it plainness. A thing is plain (plenum), when it is laid out open and smooth upon a level surface. An object is in plain sight when the form and shape of It are distinctly visible. Chaucer, in his "Canterbury Tales, * makes the franklin, the English freeholder of his day, to say, when called upon for his story I never lerned rhetorike certain. Thing that I spoke, it mote be bare and plain. This quotation shows that in Chewer's time rhetoric was the opposite of a lucid and distinct presentation of truth. In hisage it had become excessively artificial in Its principles, and altogether mechanical in its applications. Hence the plain, clear-headed Englishman, whose story turns out to be told with a simplicity and perspicuity and raciness that renders it truly eloquent, supposed that it must necessarily be faulty in style, because his own good sense and keen eye made it impossible for him to &mousse In the affected and false rhetoric of the school of that day. For this plainness of style is the product of sagacity and keenness. A sagacious understanding always speaks in plain terms. A keen vision describes like an eyewitness. —Saarta Once more : Mastery of language includes a retentive control of a vocabulary, and of varieties of English construction, by which they shall always be at hand for unconscious use. Do we not often fret for the right word, which is just outside the closed door of memory ? We know that there is such a word ; we know that it is precisely the word we want ; no other can fill its place ; we saw it mentally a short half-hour ago, but we bust the air for it now. The power we crave is the power to store words within reach, and hold them In mental reserve till they are wanted, and then to summon them by the unconscious vibration of a thought. Nothing can give it to us but Andy and use of the language in long-continued and critical practice. It is the slow fruitage of a growing mind. Walter Scott, for instance, saunters through the streets of Edinburgh, and overhears a word, which, in its colloquial connections, expresses a shade of thought which is novel to him. He pauses, and makes a note of it, and walks on, pondering it, till it hes made a nest for itself in his brain ; and at 'math that word reappears in one of the most graphic scenes in the "Fortunes of Nigel. " . . . Washington Irving relates that he was once riding with Thomas Moore in Paris. when the hackney coach went suddenly into a rut, out of which it came with such jolt as to send their heads bumping against the roof. "By Jove, I've got it I" cried Moore, clapping his hands in great glee. "Got what ?" said Irving. "Why, " said the poet, "that word which I've been hunting for six weeks to complete my last song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me. "—PHELPS. To affect a particular style is of course ridiculous. Whatever possible value an essay may have comes from its expression of the genuine thought of the writer. If his thoughts be noble, and he be able to give them adequate expression, his essay will be noble ; but if his thoughts are trivial, and he tries to express them in such language as someone has used to express noble thoughts, his weazened thoughts will seem all the more shrunken in the flowing word-garments that flap around them. Besides, small thoughts have a place and a value as well as great ones. David could not fight in Saul's armor, but when fitly clad in his mountain costume he could do execution impossible to the burly king. I aped Johnson, I preached Johnson. It was a youthful folly, a very great folly. I might as well have attempted to dance a hornpipe in the dress of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts could not sustain the load of words in which I tried to clothe them. —Roma Henn Aim at things, and your words will be right without aiming. Guard against love of display, love of singularity, love of seeming original. Aim at meaning what you say, and saying what you mean. — NEWMAN. But if he is a thinker, who has seen some great truths more penetratingly, and has felt them more profoundly than other men have done, then in this sense a thinker Carlyle certainly was. Isolated truths there may have been, but isolated truths were all he cared or hoped to see ; he felt too keenly the mystery of things ever to fancy that he or any other man would see them all in well-rounded harmony. It was just because he saw and felt some truths so keenly, that he was enabled to paint them in words so vividly. It was the insight that was in him which made him a word-painter ; without that insight word painting becomes a mere trick of words. —SHAnw. An amusing account is given by Lord Macaulay of a criticism by Sheridan upon the style and manner of Mr. Fox and Lord Stormont in the British Parliament. Sheridan had returned one morning from the meeting of Parliament, and a friend asked him for the news of the day. He replied that he had enjoyed a laugh over the speeches of those two men. He said that Lord Stormont began by declaring in a slow, solemn, nasal monotone that, "when—he—considered—the enormity—and the-unoonstittational—tendency —of the meamrea—just—proposed, he was—hnrried—away in a—torrent--of passion— and a—whirlwind—of im-pet-u-os-i-ty. " Mr. Fox he described as rising with a spring to his feet, and beginning, with the rapidity of lightning, thee: "Mr. Speaker such is the magnitude such the miperfany, such the vital Interest of the question that I cannot but Implore I cannot but adjure the Hones to come to it with the utmost cahnnes, the utmost coolness the utmost deliberaaon. "—Plutia. s. The False Idea that style is something superimposed, like a cupola, upon a structure that would be complete without it, has led to false views of the province of rhetoric, and to false ideals on the part of young writers. "For esteeming any man purely on account of his rhetoric, I would as soon choose a pilot for a good head of hair, " said Seneca. But rhetoric is to the statesman what skill is to the pilot. The statesman may be a traitor, in spite of great oratorical ability ; and the pilot may be in league with wreckers, however accurate his knowledge of the coast and of the vessel. But rhetoric will enable the statesman to say what he means, and to say it convincingly, thus insuring him against blundering and weakness ; just as skill will secure the pilot against unwittingly running upon a hidden rock. That rhetorical skill is not universal or undesirable in office-holders may be inferred from the following official notices. (See also pages 297-300. ) The Connecticut Legislature passed a bill for paying the town clerk of New Haven for "time spent in deciphering those portions of the town records which are partly or wholly Illegible. " How much time was need by the clerk in deciphering wholly illegible records is not stated. A post in Ansonia, Conn. , bore a card with the following inscription : "There did a young Pig Stray away on the 16th of the present month from george thomm of West Ansonia or Wendy Hill any person or persons Seeing or giving information of the Pig would confer a great fever on the a Bove. " The pig is supposed to hate gone after a spelling-book. A Common Councilman who was on the Committee of Public Instruction in Fall River, Mass. , drafted the following order : "Ordered that the super in tender of streets is heir By orthorized 2 erect and =ohms 2 street lites on John street. " Their list of unprotected and imprisoned animals noted one day last week such hitherto unheard of creatures as "too nufoodlen dogs" and "font littel kreem collard doges. ' Divers companions In misery are described with equal fidelity as "won yeller dog" and "sevun broun doge. " If to a wretched animal's death could be added a pang, it would be the knowledge that his obituary called him a littel kreem collard doge. -21. Deese. The late Hon. Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts spent the larger part of his mature life as a member of legislative bodies. For years he was the Mentor of the Massachusetts Legislature at a time when his politics put him always in a minority on any political measure. Yet he saved the State from much unconstitutional legislation by his power of command over the English language. It has been said that no suit at law is known to have been brought into court by any lawyer, in which the success of the suit depended on proving to be unconstitutional or defective any statute of which Caleb Cushing had the control in the committee which framed it. He was able to say, and to assist legislators to say, so exactly what was meant, that no clear-headed advocate could misunderstand the statute, or find a flaw in it by which to sustain a lawsuit. The explanation of that rare power of his of precise utterance, as given by those who knew him best, is, that he read and conversed in half-a-dozen languages, and made language the study of his life. -PHELPS. The Qualitiesof style may be considered under the heads of P IIRITY, ROPRIETY, RECISION, ERSPICUITY, OWER, ERFECTION. TOPICAL ANALYSIS. Style. Matter vs. Manner, p. 842. On the other hand, p. 344. The beat definitions, p. 344. Naturalness, p. 348. The end in view, p. 847. Affecting a particular style, p. 848. The false idea that style is superimposed, p. 350. The qualities of style, p. 851. Category:Style